gfp

There are no extra points awarded in this business for degree of difficulty. Keep it simple and focus on a few things you come to understand deeply. Even Buffett, who is a top rated, very large, corporate issuer of grade-A interest-only Japanese paper, only uses the proceeds to fund Yen based investments in Japan (although several of those trading companies have significant business in USD as well).

I think the linked thread is old and the survey is broken. There have been several of these threads over the years. I think the link below is to the most recent bell curve distribution and working poll ->

From someone who doesn't follow this situation particularly closely - my question is: Does the envisioned "private" version of Fannie and Freddie still issue de-facto government guaranteed MBS? Or is this envisioned as fully private companies with some vague "too big to fail / systemic" sort of "guarantee"?

I couldn't find a thread on RLI so I'm going to put this here on an old insider purchases thread. Someone should make a thread on RLI (not me)! They have been crazy good underwriters for decades. Any of the old timers on this board remember "Harry Long" ?? He used to post about RLI here a long time ago. I always got a kick out of the original name of the company standing for "replacement lens insurance" - as in: Insurance for your contact lenses! Anyway- they got downgraded by some analyst and the insiders have been all over the stock this week: https://www.dataroma.com/m/ins/ins.php?t=m&po=1&am=0&sym=RLI&o=fd&d=d

Bulkheads baby! There's a reason Pacificorp can be bankrupted without taking down BHE, much less BRK.A.. An LLC for every project and a chase ink rewards card sign up bonus for every LLC. A chicken in every pot sorry for off-topic - back to Fairfax

Oh yeah! We bought a huge umbrella policy from USAA right after the first time we were sued! Ignorance was bliss but umbrella coverage with your main carrier is really pretty cheap

From what I can remember of Miles Davis' autobiography, Miles sure did! But yeah, love Bill Evans. I grew up listening to this era of jazz

I mean, I feel like most people buy insurance because they are required to by a law or a lender protecting their collateral.

What happens to this analysis when book value approaches zero and passes into negative territory? Surely it will happen soon enough at Apple [ticker AAPL for those playing at home]. This simple calculation will be distorted when Apple's book value is one dollar and kind of useless when Apple's book value is negative 50 billion dollars. At what point does Apple's reported Return on Equity stop having useful analytical value? Is it $100 billion? $40 billion? One dollar? It might be that a super simple calculation, whether it is price to earnings or return on equity, is not really the end all be all.

I'm curious what percent of your net worth your largest single position is?

The low this day ended up being $252.16. Chubb reports earnings after the close today

Nothing specific - just in general the Indian stock market looks to be headed lower and I guess I expect it to continue for a while.

https://archive.ph/Ar7Ax NormR article on one of our members here - congrats on 5 years Trevor Scott / Tidefall

earnings season is starting - good results from BRO https://www.bbinsurance.com/news/brown-organic-revenue-growth-of-13-8-diluted-net-income-per-share-of-0-73-and-dil/

The same amount of money bought NVDA today as sold it. These rotations happen when the go-go names get spooked. Berkshire stock usually ramps. Sometimes it lasts. Usually not

Yeah, I feel like this 5 handle on 20 year treasury bonds would have been hard for him to resist but we'll see!

If Fairfax India "wins" the deal I think it's a near certainty that CSB gets merged into IDBI and IDBI is the brand name that survives. I think that is a requirement. I don't think it solves anything for the sellers if CSB pays in new stock, so I doubt that is likely. I think you see FIH.U buy what it can, however those funds are obtained, and FFH parent company provide a chunk of capital and then the usual co-investor friendly partners that FFH regularly goes to. Maybe Oaktree "loses" and co-invests, maybe FIH.U places new shares at $20 to raise some capital (I doubt it). The participation of certain Canadian pension funds on boilerplate friendly preferred stock deals would not be surprising! I don't think Kotak Mahindra "wins" for the reason mentioned above - I think India wants IDBI to continue as the brand name and the surviving institution and I don't think Kotak Mahindra Bank does that but we'll see.. The more time that passes before this potential deal closes, the more capital both FIH and FFH have available. Market conditions don't seem right for an Anchorage IPO at the moment but isn't that still on-deck at some point?

The Warren Buffett's of the world need a turn getting stimulated! Poor people had their 6 months in the sun

Anyone could have signed up. They mentioned it at the annual meeting. I assume thomas cook india did the booking

You're smart and I'm right so sooner or later you will come around to the truth. Basically everything you wrote above is incorrect. ( but extremely conventional )

Did anyone on this message board attend the Fairfax India investor tour / trip this year? I know Sanjeev went years ago. Who went this year?

Just remember - for the most part - the Federal Reserve doesn't really have the ability to create new money. Private banks and the Federal Government do - but basically the "Fed" does not. The Fed can use their tool-kit to try to influence the amount of credit extended by private banks - but they are often simultaneously working against their goals. Demand for credit and creditworthiness are the primary drivers of private bank money growth. The government's deficit stimulus is obviously the primary driver of "new dollar money" into the system and the Fed's main tool, hiking up interest rates at the end of the curve the government primarily borrows at - increases the deficit stimulus into the private sector.

Here's another example: The Fed wants to stimulate the economy by doing "QE." So they buy up interest bearing coupon securities from the private sector and now that interest income is being earned by the Fed, on the Fed's big old balance sheet. In place of the securities they bought, the private sector got bank reserves at the Fed, which at the time didn't pay interest and where of little to no use in the real economy. There was a surplus of bank reserves in the system and they are all parked at the Fed and the level of private bank lending is not constrained by the amount of bank reserves in the system - it is constrained by other regulations and market demand for new loans, credit quality, etc.. So during this period, the Federal Reserve earns a profit on their balance sheet - look it up - big profit. It remits this profit to the Treasury. What do you call it when interest income that would have gone to the private sector is instead not earned by the private sector and remitted to the Treasury, reducing the deficit? That's essentially a tax. Revenue to the government that reduces the deficit. What did QE do that was stimulative? It barely had any effect on Government bond rates. The Fed has studied this themselves and found a few basis points, maybe... They expanded it to MBS and it, along with very short durations of mortgages during the refinancing booms, led to tighter spreads on MBS over treasuries - that was stimulative. Was it more stimulative than the counter-stimulative effect spelled out in the first paragraph? I doubt it, but it is impossible to say for sure since we don't know what the spreads on MBS over treasury securities would have been without the Fed expanding QE to MBS. ** remember, "QE" and "QT" are just swapping one form of federal liability (what we call "money") for another. swapping in a bank reserve, even though those do now pay interest (new feature..) but removing a highly useful treasury security - the base highest quality collateral for the entire global financial system's transformation, leverage and exchange engine, is not a stimulative swap for the private sector

Here's one small example of how your understanding of the Fed's primary tool - short term interest rates - could very well be close to 180 degrees backward. Remember that around 80% of the US debt is owned by the private sector and the rate of interest paid on this primarily short term debt increases or decreases the level of deficit stimulus - --- Here’s the scenario. You have a stable company that doesn’t make much of anything over time but also doesn’t lose value either. It isn’t a great investment but the share price, intrinsic value, etc, is basically stable. Trades at $100 per share. You own 100 shares, $10,000. [for the dense, I am going to spell it out - this is US Dollar cash in this metaphor] This company decides to implement an all stock dividend of $5 per share annually. Not a cash dividend, a stock dividend, which is more like a tiny stock split. Let’s say they target 5% annually for this stock dividend. Next year you have 105 shares but everybody else also has 5% more stock, the company is identical to the earlier scenario and the share price starts to drift down by about 5% per year, leaving the market cap of the company essentially unchanged. Each year they do this, and low and behold, the “inflation” – the rate at which the value of one share loses value, is basically gravitating towards the “interest rate”. If the all-stock dividend is targeted at 7% annually, the stock in the above example will start to experience a loss of value, per share, of around 7% annually. If the all-stock dividend is targeted at 2% annually, the loss in per share value due to this “inflation” will tend to gravitate towards 2% annually. Do you see what I am pointing out? There comes a point in the sovereign interest rate setting game, where the interest rate on government borrowing is materially effecting the size of the deficit (because the majority of the borrowing is done at the short end, where rates are not set by market forces), and a large enough share of the government debt is “owned by the public,” – there comes a point where the artificially set interest rate from the Fed starts to act like a magnet to the inflation rate just like the stock dividend example above. They are giving you more of the same instrument.

That's great Dynamic - and a perfect illustration in real-time of the fact that you do not need very many great ideas in an investing career to really shoot the lights out. There are a bunch of different ways to play this game but the way you played it has worked phenomenally, with little real risk - even with "unconventional concentration." It was available to basically any value bro that hangs out on message boards like this. And it outperforms the index.